


Try to Lighten Your Load

by ivyspinners



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Implied Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-10
Updated: 2012-10-10
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River Song discovers that sometimes forgiveness can be a burden of its own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Try to Lighten Your Load

**Author's Note:**

> I deeply wish that this were River/Rose fic, but alas, it stayed gen. Written post-s5, so now non-compliant with canon.

Sometimes it feels like she's been searching forever.

Then she remembers that the forever of a human is just a heartsbeat in the life of a Time Lord. She should know this.

He would laugh at her.

She hates his smugness, but god does she wish he would laugh at her again.

"Why me?" she asks a statue of him once, atop a stretch of rock lost and found in the reaches of deep space. Fields of stars stretch all around her, rich jewelled pinpoints of light, nebulas swelling in multicoloured clouds and reminding her of the meaning of eternity. Her space suit feels like a very thin shell to separate her from the black of the abyss.

The statue has no answer, only gazes back with those ancient, sad eyes. She keeps looking.

She stakes out the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries after a while, and curses herself for nearly forgetting how drawn he was to them. Amy lived there. Donna lived there. Jack lived there. Barbara, Ian, Sarah-Jane. Others he never trusted her enough to tell her about lived there too.

They're all so young compared to how she saw them last, when they - even Amy, who lived a normal human lifespan and died an extraordinary death - made her feel like the child she was. She's the experienced one now; though the hollowed desolation in Jack's eyes reminds her that she can't count herself that old yet.

She watches London in particular because Martha Jones has a phone, and she should call using it but can't bring herself to.

He never does show up - not in one of the forms she knows, or would know her. She walks London streets instead, browsing through the time period she's only starting to unravel, worn archaeology diploma a ghost of wind across her shoulder. The itch to inspect stories doesn't come. She's glad: she doesn't deserve to get off lightly.

Parks and benches, homes and stores. In one clothing store the shop girl gives her a strange look as she runs her fingers through fabric with relish.

"Just got it imported," the shop girl informs her hopefully. "Out of the country."

"Haven't got any money," she answers absently, not particularly worried about being thrown out - even if it's a supposedly high-class place. She also doesn't say that 'out of the country' means about as much as 'off-planet' to her.

The girl just grins, a lovely smile that, strangely, makes her want to smile back. "S'okay. Window shopping's free. Just don't tell the manager."

She puts this down to another old idiom she doesn't understand, certain that windows do, indeed, cost money. Twenty-first century Londoners and their slang.

The girl nods to her as she leaves, and this time River does smile back. She would have visited again but vacation time is over. She needs to keep searching.

Stars and galaxies, planets and outer moons. Somehow, Earth calls her back - or maybe it's just her knowledge about how it calls to him.

She visits his statue again, but the vortex manipulator shorts out and she ends up three thousand years into the future, when the moon's been colonized and the statue crumbled to dust by the new atmosphere. Her manipulator falls into the wrong hands; she destroys it and then retaliates by stranding the thief ship-less on the moon, grinning at the old earth animal logo embossed on his ship - a predator, she's sure - and the old English calligraphy beneath it.

_I can't find him now,_ she realises. All of time and space, and she's trapped in a linear life now. How's she supposed to look?

Would he even want her to?

If she closes her eyes, she can see him now. Her Doctor - her first Doctor, bow ties and braces, tweed jackets and that short-lived fez - looking back at her.

"I asked you," he says. "You almost couldn't bring yourself to do it... but I begged you to. Do you think I could possibly blame you?"

_You should_ , she doesn't say back, and opening her eyes makes the image disappear. _You're the one who keeps piling pain on his shoulders until we can't help but try to lighten your load._

She keeps searching.

She remembers that he spoke once of eighteenth-century France and tries to hijack a drifting ship of robots to get there. She ends up jumping back to her own ship when they learn more than she intended and get some strange, dangerous ideas. At least history's safe. He would never forgive her if she caused a paradox.

She writes a paper in between planning how to run into a Time Agent, even knowing she isn't exactly going to get a decoration to go with the diploma on her arm for her contribution to the archives. Her entries into her diary fall rapidly in word count: it's easy to keep track of the linear, the less dangerous. (Though her ship seems quite insistent about stalling at the strangest times, nearly stranding her in the middle of rebellions and forest planets. Those diary entries tend to come in broad chunks, and her notes for future papers grow ever longer.) For a while, she even manages to forget.

Odd, that. It's during this, while she's not looking, that strange things happen to her.

She meets a stranger with a smile just the slightest bit familiar, who is searching for someone too. River keeps the girl's head from being bitten off, exchanges a story of time travel, eyes the girl's travel device and plans how to take it off her - she is sorry, but the Doctor is more important - and nearly manages, but the girl slips away at the last moment.

"Nothing you do could possibly be more important than this," the girl says coolly, "and it won't take you where you think it does."

River runs towards her, races towards her with her gun out and hope in her chest, but with a flash of blue the girl is gone.

Her gun clatters to the floor and she lets herself cry, hating that the ship just had to strand her here. Painful tears from a bitter well-spring, but no amount of weeping seems to be able to wash away the stinging hope. Just that one hour when she dared to believe, she was more alive than she had been for the past few months.

It's when she's finishing the paper that she meets the same girl, and for once, she meets someone in the right order. Their guns are out and pointed at each other without preamble.

"Huh," the girl says. "S'not supposed to take me to the same place twice."

"Is that a London accent?" River asks, aim steady and hoping that the girl's gun can't punch through the walls of her ship.

"Lots of planets have a London," the girl murmurs with a smile. "I meant what I said the last time, you know. This doesn't do what you want it to. It can't find who you're looking for."

"You seem certain you'll succeed."

"I've been doing this too long to think anything else," the girl says, honey brown hair sliding across her shoulder as she shrugs. Her eyes flicker around to take everything in. They catch onto something and she lowers her gun, tucks it onto her back. "Why?"

River watches her, stares at her, and then her weapon's tucked away too, understanding settling between them like silence. Words cannot describe the wistfulness shared between girl and woman, the two WOMEN, hoping because to do otherwise would be to despair; searching because that's the only anchor they really have. Has she really become so narrow in focus?

Once, just once, she is tired of her only confidant being a small blue diary.

"I killed the man I love," River admits. "He told me his greatest secret, begged me to kill him so that everyone else could live, and I did."

"You want to find him before, and what? Keep him alive?"

River closes her eyes, says it out loud for the first time. "He needs to know. In the grand scheme of things, he's much more important than me."

The woman walks past her, runs her hand down the side of River's ship. Abruptly, she asks, "Is he a time traveller too?"

"Yes. I thought it would be exciting," River confesses to a woman who is no better than a stranger. (Maybe that's why this is easy: the woman cannot infer who she is talking about, cannot be a reminder that for once she couldn't hold her tongue.)

The woman listens.

"An out-of-time relationship," she says. "Knowing that I could keep him from being alone when he needs me. But nearly every time he sees me, he's younger, or he's much, much older. He barely knows me, or he knows too much, except both ways I only know him in flashes because he can't stay still long enough for anything else and neither can I. And I can't tell him anything. I can't stop the people he loves from dying, can't stop him falling in love, can't travel with him because history's written and I wasn't in it."

The woman says, very softly, "Oh." And, "But you're trying to find it and change him anyway."

"No." As she says this, River realises that it's true; she has reminded herself. The Doctor made sure River Song knew the workings of time, left indelible marks that remain even now that he's gone.

Her companion turns around, hand slipping gently off the ship's logo, her smile like a sad epiphany. There's that feeling of familiarity again.

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"I spoke where I should have kept my mouth shut, but you won't do the same?"

The woman laughs. "Not much to say. Normal dull life, met a man, fell in love, had adventures. Found out that I was the latest in a long line, an' then I wasn't the latest at all. Realised there was a lot about him an' me we didn't talk about and I coped by not talking about it even more. Got separated rather... badly. Crossed worlds to look for him. Got love advice from strangers." She stares into the distance. "It's strange. I met so many like him, interrupted their lives. Some of them knew me, sort of, and it hurt them to remember. But it hurt them more when I blamed myself 'cos he's got the weight of everyone in the universe on his shoulders. I try to stop, but I just can't, and it's..."

There is much more to her story, just like River's is only the surface of the pond, the pond of her love life amidst the garden of her being--hopes, dreams, ambitions, stories. Sandpits of the memories of long-dead civilisations. Except she's stuck there on the surface of the pond, her lies about moving on an utter joke, moving forwards even worse. Is it moving on when she lets her guilt bury her memories so that if her hopes are raised and shot, she shatters? When she has two paths--her work, him--but can't choose either or even both? Is it moving forwards when she would rather talk to a statue than to someone he knew?

_Do you think I could possibly blame you?_

_You should._

Her strange quest to find him--to try and help, atone for what she's done and will do--is destined to be a failure if she can't accept that she might be forgiven. All her time jumping about the future has made her forget that she has one too.

"I think I learned something too," River breathes, and wonders what the other woman meant about love lessons.

They part ways.

She decides to enact the plan she came up with for the Time Agent all those months ago, when she first started her research into the sixth millennium AD.

River buries her papers where they'll be found in the later half of the fifty-first century and does her equivalent of drugging and mugging the Time Agent that arrives first to find her, then high-tails it before backup can arrive. (Honestly, the Doctor was right. Time Agents aren't exactly... the most competent and this one might be a bit of all right, but really isn't well-trained.) She visits Torchwood in the twenty-third century, steals Jack's phone, and calls so that she won't have an excuse to avoid the Doctor when he comes.

A forever of searching later, River Song finds the Doctor.

After this she'll give herself up to the authorities, go to prison except when she's needed. She'll write her papers until she's out again, pulled together and ready to travel the river of time.

She doubts it will be enough to make her forgive herself - or even make her want to - but he gave his life for her. The Doctor's taught her how to bear her burdens and for both their sakes she will do it.


End file.
